community-based research paper

8/3/2019 Community-Based Research Paper

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LIFT-Chicago 1

Running head: LIFT-CHICAGO

Organizational Action Research on Lift-Chicago

Meghan Donaghy, Adam Garrison, Mark Lamb, Jennifer Severyn, Tameer Siddiqui

Loyola University Chicago



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Background/Content

In the fall of 1998, Yale University students Kirsten Lodal and Brian Kreiter founded

LIFT, a growing movement to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the

United States. Both Lodal and Kreiter started out as active volunteers in a variety of child

services programs but then noticed the difficult obstacles the children’s parents were facing.

Parents were often working multiple low-wage jobs, paying their taxes, and sending their kids to

school, yet still were unable to afford sustained shelter, food, and clothing for their children.

LIFT was established with the intention of helping underprivileged adults through a variety of

social services including finding jobs, securing housing, obtaining public benefits, and making

connections with other social service agencies.

With LIFT’s first center firmly established in New Haven, Lodal and Kreiter soon

discovered that student leaders on college campuses across the country were dialoguing about

the same issues related to poverty and opportunity and were eager to get involved with these

issues. Lodal and Kreiter recruited passionate student leaders to replicate sites of their

organization around the country. LIFT now serves thousands of families each year in Boston,

Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Today, LIFT has become one of the

most active voices in the call to bring domestic poverty to the forefront of our nation’s

consciousness (Our History).

LIFT-Chicago focuses on five asset areas — basic necessities, employment/financial

stability, housing, education and training, and health care — that are vital for individual and

family success on the path out of poverty. By working one-on-one with LIFT volunteers to find

jobs, secure safe and stable housing, make ends meet through public benefits and tax credits, and

obtain quality referrals for services like childcare and health care, LIFT clients are able to



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holistically address their immediate and long-term needs while making concrete steps towards

realizing their greater dreams and aspirations. In the process of working toward their goals, LIFT

clients develop an important internal “toolkit” for progress and resiliency that enables them to

move forward independently and bounce back from challenges and setbacks. With the support

of LIFT volunteers, clients strengthen their goal-setting abilities, problem-solving skills,

knowledge of key community resources, self-confidence, and ability to advocate for themselves

and their families (Path out of Poverty).

Research Question

Our community-based research project seeks to address the issue of housing. Firstly, we

are interested in studying the prominent issues facing clients at LIFT-Chicago in regards to

housing and what resources LIFT-Chicago volunteers can provide to their clients to best support

the clients’ needs. The second part of our research project focuses on advocacy and how we can

assist the clients, particularly with finding stable housing. By understanding the various issues

that create problems for LIFT-Chicago’s clients, we are better able to make a positive difference

with efforts to enhance housing conditions. Our effort to make a lasting impact for the clients at

LIFT-Chicago has come in the form of a telephone survey as well as a flowchart. The telephone

survey we created has been used in an effort to speak directly with hundreds of LIFT-Chicago’s

clients regarding housing issues. Based on their responses, we were able to examine the issues

carefully and then search for resources that would resolve the clients’ housing issues. For

instance, many clients reported bedbugs in their apartments, so we researched low-cost agencies

that can help resolve this problem. All of the housing issues we heard about from clients, as well

as the resources we found to help resolve these issues, has been put into a tangible flowchart

which the client will be able to access at the office of LIFT-Chicago.



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This flowchart is imperative because currently, many LIFT clients are faced with housing

issues that they cannot adequately resolve due to their economic situations and social position.

For example, a client may complain to his landlord about a cockroach infestation, but the client

has no social or financial power to convince the landlord to fix the problem. In such a situation, a

client may be forced to move out of his apartment, which is expensive and time-consuming for

the client and also does nothing to resolve the issue at hand, meaning someone else could move

into that roach-infested apartment later. Even if the client does not move, he will likely have to

silently stomach his shoddy living conditions with few other options, thus going without the

basic human right of a decent place to live. This is why our research project culminates with a

flowchart of resources, which LIFT-Chicago’s clients may access. Such resources will help

directly solve the clients’ housing issues and improve their present living conditions so that A)

their homes are more adequate for a human to live in, thus fulfilling a basic human need, B) they

do not need to go through the rigorous, costly, and time-consuming process of finding new

housing that they can afford, and C) housing conditions will be improved for those who live

there in the future.

Data Collection

To collect our data, we surveyed clients who had come into LIFT-Chicago in the past

year regarding their own housing conditions (See Appendix). LIFT’s site coordinator gave us a

list of 282 clients to call, and we divided this list evenly among our five group members. Each

client was called up to three times if he or she did not answer the phone. This experience

demonstrated how difficult and varied this form of data collection can be. The two main

challenges presented were that clients did not want to take the survey, which is rather typical of

any phone survey, and that myriad phone numbers we called were disconnected or invalid. After



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calling each client three times and thus determining we had the maximum number of responses

possible, a total of 74 clients affirmed that they currently faced housing issues or had faced them

in the recent past.

The 74 clients who affirmed that they have housing issues reported 82 cases of housing

issues in total. We broke down the reported cases into six subcategories: economic issues, bed

bugs, pests, sanitation, safety, and appliances/aesthetics. Below are the six subcategories

containing the specific problems of the reported cases, followed by a breakdown of the cases by

number.

Results and Findings

It appears that only about a quarter of LIFT-Chicago’s clients are in the midst of

housing issues. The organization’s clientele seems to come to LIFT in search of resources for

different issues, most notably finding work, but this does not mean that housing issues are to be

taken lightly. In fact, housing issues seem to go hand-in-hand with many other social issues. Of

the 74 people who claimed to have housing issues, over a third of them cite economic woes as

the source of their housing struggles. Present economic times are difficult, and it seems that the

lack of available jobs in the market is one of the biggest influencing factors on the housing crisis.

People are forced to either live in the place of residency of family members or in conditions that

are sub-par at best. These places, usually SROs or apartments that are rather run-down, are where

the other housing issues can be found. These include faulty appliances or aesthetic problems,

such as plumbing, climate control in the building, the décor, etc (See Appendix). The people

residing in places with these issues often have a hard enough time making rent, let alone

throwing out money for repairs for such problems, and the landlords rarely step in to help, so the



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issues persist. One out of every five clients that reported housing issues claimed that appliances

were the source of their concerns, if not one of several.

Pests, bedbugs, sanitation, and violence were also issues of concern to the LIFT clients.

The aforementioned dilapidated housing structures are host to a variety of creatures that, due to

the inaction of landlords or inability to afford exterminators, force the residents to simply tolerate

them and deal with them as they can. It is a horrific thought to have to share your home with

cockroaches and bedbugs while being helpless against them, and yet roughly one out of nine

Chicagoans live this reality.

Once again, these issues tie back into the financial struggles faced by the clients, and

unfortunately this was outside of our domain in regards to our research project. However, it is

clear that residents have trouble affording the services to repair their housing or a better place of

residency in general. Thus, we set out to find companies that would be willing to work with the

organization in resolving these issues and that could be added to LIFT-Chicago’s comprehensive

resource guide.

Implications

The implications of our findings can be summed up simply as the housing issue is not a

singular thing, but rather a web of interconnected problems that cannot be fixed by a simple,

single cure-all solution. There are a plethora of problems faced by each client and they need to be

deconstructed layer by layer, and the underlying causes and issues each need their own

resolution. To take all of them on would be overwhelming, and while some of the issues may

overlap either in action or between clients, any organization that attempted to take them on

would be spread too thin, both on manpower and time.



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Making changes and fixing the problems people face isn’t going to be a fast or glorious

process. However, if it is taken one step at a time and each issue is actually solved rather than

given a Band-Aid solution, the housing problems people face will be greatly reduced. (Complete

eradication of the issues is ideal, but impossible.) Fixing the problems will also require the

coordinated efforts of many people, from the landlords to the residents to the organizations and

companies involved, all on benevolent principles of helping residents.

Suggestions for Further Research

Our study did not control for race, gender, economic status, or age; thus, we suggest that

future community-based researchers develop a concrete way to control for such moderating

variables that have the potential to bias or induce shortcomings for the overall research.

Additionally, it would be important to focus the survey questions so as to have a more tangible

list of predicaments and narrow in on several of those. If that were done in the future, it might be

possible to pair residents with specific problems to specific organizations and companies that

could offer help to alleviate their problems. In contrast, we took the phone survey and never

followed up with the participants, disallowing further help to be offered and provided. Lastly,

our research was done via self-report, which has limitations in that certain effects of hazardous

housing conditions could have been over-generalized or forgotten during the brief phone

conversations we had with clients.

In future studies, we argue the importance of utilizing trained researchers in an effort to

offer a more realistic portrayal of the issues clients face in terms of housing. This portrayal

would come from one-on-one conversations with various clients that could be performed over a

longer period of time, which would result in more detailed depictions of certain conditions and

more realistic achievement of goals set by the researchers. In terms of goals, it might be useful to



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hone in on two or three specific goals of the project, including one concerning following up with

participants, which will likely induce more change than simply locating organizations that will

offer low- or no-cost services. While there are companies that are willing to offer low- or no-cost

services to families and individuals who are constrained economically, future researchers could

bridge the gap between individuals in need and those who could potentially provide them

necessary services, which is something that working- and lower-class families and individuals

often have trouble doing.

Conclusion

LIFT-Chicago is a resource center for people in need of employment, education, public

benefits, and stable and secure housing, among other things. Our research project has attempted

to maximize the efforts of LIFT in connecting clients to assistance with an array of housing

problems by first conducting a survey of LIFT-Chicago clients to deduce the most often faced

housing issues and then locating resources within the community that can help resolve some of

these issues so that the clients’ current housing conditions may improve for their sake and the

sake of those who will live in their buildings in the future. We found that the most prevalent

housing issues among the people that we surveyed could be divided into six categories —

economic issues, bed bugs, pests, sanitation, safety, and appliances/aesthetics — and we were able

to locate resources that LIFT-Chicago had not been aware of before that could help with these

problems. Economic issues such as doubling-up with relatives or being unable to afford market-

rate housing were by far the most cited by the 74 respondents with housing issues as their

number one problem with their current living conditions. This is mostly outside the scope of our

intended project, as economic issues are complicated and cannot be addressed in the same

concrete way that bedbugs can be, for example. However, the frequency with which economic



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issues were mentioned is indicative of the complexity of housing problems as well. Housing

issues are not simply tangible violations of human standards of decent housing, such as pest

infestation or lack of sanitation, but rather all of these issues seem to be symptoms of a much

more widespread social plague: poverty.

We were able to find resources to help combat poverty on an individual level, which is

vital to the well-being of people in the here and now, but in order to ultimately solve housing

issues to the utmost degree possible, we need to directly address poverty and its root causes.

However, LIFT’s goal is to assist people with present needs and so the organization may

continue this admirable mission by further studies which control for factors like race or gender,

have more extensive yet focused conversations with clients to define the housing issues they

have, and personally link clients to the resources they require. Ultimately, such research will aid

individuals with housing problems or economic issues in the present while discovering methods

for preventing such issues in the future, which in the end helps to fight poverty.



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References

Our History | LIFT. (n.d.). LIFT: Combating Poverty and Expanding Opportunity | LIFT .

Retrieved September 29, 2011, from http://www.liftcommunities.org/about/history

Our Volunteers in Chicago | LIFT. (n.d.). LIFT: Combating Poverty and Expanding Opportunity

| LIFT . Retrieved October 4, 2011, from http://www.liftcommunities.org/chicago/our-

work/volunteers



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Appendix

Number of Clients Who Do and Don't Have Housing Issues

Number of Clients Percentage of Clients

Do 74 26.24%

Don’t 208 73.76%

Total 282

26%

30%4%

40%

Confirmed housing issues

Inavlid Numbers

Refused to answer questions

Other

LIFT-Chicago Sample



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Survey

Hi my name is _________________ and I am a student at Loyola University Chicago doing a

project for LIFT Chicago. We are contacting everyone who has been to LIFT for help withhousing in the past year. We are trying to research helpful organizations in the community about

prevalent issues regarding housing and hoping to use the information to make significant future

changes. If you have a minute or two, I have a few questions to ask you.

1.) Are there currently any specific problems in terms of your housing conditions?

2.) If so, what kinds of problems have you encountered? If not, have you experienced any

problems with housing in the past?

3.) Are you aware of anyone else in your building who has had to deal with similar or other

housing issues?

4.) How are the problems you and/or others have experienced or are experiencing been resolved?

What has the time frame been like in terms of how quickly issues are attended to?

5.) Would you be interested in getting involved with a community organizer who works

specifically with housing advocacy efforts?

Economic

Pests

Bed Bug

Sanitation

Safety

Appliances/Aesthetics

Thematic Analysis of Housing Issues



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